Microsoft has halted construction in West Des Moines, Iowa where it recently purchased land to build a huge data centre.

A sale sign with Microsoft’s name on it only went up five months ago, but come October the company announced plans to reel in its data centre spending by about $300m.

The first victim of that decision is the Iowa-based web farm. The software giant said it will also review other plants currently in the process of being built.

"We are still continuing construction of our facilities in Chicago and Dublin, and are planning to open them as customer demand warrants,” said Microsoft's Mike Manos and Arne Josefsberg last Friday in a blog post.

"But given the current economic climate we're going to do the right thing for our business and shareholders and revisit our plans on a quarter-by-quarter basis."

The latest belt-tightening move came on the same day that Microsoft said it would stitch together its Windows Live and Office Live services, and just one day after the software giant confirmed it was slashing 5,000 jobs.

Manos and Josefsberg claimed the firm’s online biz was on the up, despite the fact that it will, for the time being, remain one data centre lighter than it had planned to be just a few months ago.

“We expect that more companies will turn to our services to save money – by allowing them to decrease overhead costs – and that software developers will increasingly use the flexibility and low cost of entry of our new Azure platform,” said the MS pair. ®